November 22nd 2024. Ingria and I have recently started attending a monthly midweek meeting called “The Filling Station” in a nearby Oxfordshire village hall. We have been made welcome there, and have met a few people I already know from contacts made during my 22 years of pastoral ministry in South Oxon. On our first attendance, there was a general invitation to give testimony, so I obliged, majoring on our most up-to-date adventures with God. This has led to a couple of opportunities to pray with sick people.
The most recent speaker was representing the “Freedom in Christ” movement, which I had been introduced to in the latter decade of my pastoral ministry. It was started by the American teacher Neil Anderson who had written some books, including “Set Free”. His first contact in the UK was with Steve Goss, a member of a Baptist Church in Reading, who I had recently got to know through the now defunct “Berkshire Baptist Association (of blessed memory!), when I was its penultimate President, to be succeded by Steve himself, who now has a leading worldwide role in “Freedom in Christ”.
Like most church pastors, I had, over the years, been ‘courted’ by many different programmes (mainly originating in the USA) purporting to be the ‘best thing since sliced bread’ in mobilising the church in evangelism, such as ‘Operation Mobilisation’, ‘One Step Forward’, and ‘Evangelism Explosion’. John Wimber pressed for the ‘Power Encounter’, then Neil Anderson advocated for the ‘Truth Encounter’. I found this “Freedom in Christ” course to be the most effective and repeatable of them all. It is not in itself an evangelism course, but it places you on a solid foundation from which to launch into witnessing and evangelism. Chuck Parry (ref my earlier post) spoke of the value of Christians coming together in the “Healing Room” to prepare by focusing first on who Jesus is then on who we are in Christ. In one of the most powerful statements Jesus made, he said “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” (John 8:32), followed in v36 by “If the Son makes you free you will be free indeed”.
I strongly urge you to do the course – with your church, if offered, but you can make a start just by doing an online search for “scripture verses on ‘Who I am in Christ'”.
Healing in Jesus' Name 